It’s a spread. And it’s something my parents have been doing for decades.

To me, the act of eating breakfast is almost often more memorable than the annual present exchange. Maybe this is because I associate these foods with Christmas and have a hard time believing it’s Christmas Day without the presence of a Plain Jane Scottish scone. Or maybe it’s just because it’s a delicious memory. Whatever the reason, a large breakfast is Christmas to me.

This year, there will be scones, yes. And fruit salad. But we’ve decided to diverge a bit with our entree and go with our son’s Sunday morning favorite: pancakes. But pancakes with a twist.

We don’t make your basic, dry-as-a-bone Bisquick pancakes. Oh, no. Homemade is definitely the way to go. And it’s worth it every single Sunday.

If you’ve never made homemade pancakes, they’re easy to do and taste delicious.

And these pancakes are hearty and mildly sweet thanks to the addition of a banana to the batter. In fact, these suckers are so good, I’ve been known to eat leftover pancakes cold while standing in the kitchen minutes before hitting the hay for the night. OK, maybe I did that once. Usually, there aren’t any leftovers.

For an extra bit of holiday fun, I’ve also included instructions on how to make these into Christmas-specific pancakes using cookie cutters.

Try these on Christmas morning. You won't even need a trip to the store.
by Sarah Henning

Homemade Banana Holiday Pancakes

2 1/2 cups flour

1 small banana or half a large banana

2 cups hemp milk (can sub in almond or skim milk)

2 tablespoons coconut sugar or brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons baking soda

Coconut oil (If you don't have coconut oil, don't make a special trip to the store, just use vegetable oil)

In a small bowl, mash the banana and set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients. Make a well in the middle and fill with the mashed banana and milk of choice. Stir together until just mixed.

Heat a tablespoon or so of coconut oil in a skillet. Pour pancake batter into the skillet, making the pancakes about the size of a fist. Flip when just brown.

Let pancakes rest on a large plate as you finish up with the dough. When all the dough has been used, cut the pancakes into fun shapes using holiday cookie cutters, starting with the coolest pancakes first.

Top with real maple syrup and festive fruit toppings like pomegranate seeds, clementine sections or sliced bananas. Serves three to four.

Tip: Save back the extra bits of pancakes and serve the next day torn into pieces for a bit of post-holiday “pancake” cereal. Just put the pieces in a bowl and top with maple syrup and enjoy.

It’s funny to me how each one of us associates this time of year with a certain “holidays-only” flavor.

For some, it might be eggnog. Or fruitcake. Or chestnuts.

And then there are the secondary flavors — ones that we might enjoy more this time of year than we would in any other month, even though they aren’t a December exclusive.

As we rush upon the winter solstice, I don’t tend to crave a “holidays-only” flavor, but one lumped into the secondary category. The kind that can be enjoyed in the heat of summer, but somehow represents the holidays to me and probably many others: mint.

This is probably related to the fact that when I was young, my mother made pinwheel cookies as part of her massive yearly holiday bake-a-thon. If I shut my eyes, I can easily taste the sweet, minty flavor imbued within those pink and white swirls.

Yep, those cookies are Christmas to me. And they aren’t even my favorite Christmas cookie. (That would be my mom’s chocolate-pecan squares. YUM.)

And I wanted those pinwheels this week. But because making a huge batch of cookies just to enjoy a tiny taste of one seems to be a fool’s errand (you know I’ll eat the whole dang flotilla of cookies), I decided to try to slay my craving with something a little lighter. You know, a treat that can rotate in with all that heavy holiday party fare.

The result is this pretty green smoothie. Packed with good fats, vitamin A and taste, it’s got that wintery fresh flavor that is just as welcome this time of year as the dense foods we also associate with December. But don’t drink it with a slice of fruitcake. That can only end badly — dried fruit plus mint? Yuck.

Thick and cool, this smoothie rotates in nicely with the heavier foods we see this time of year.
by Sarah Henning

Mistletoe Mint Smoothie

1 1/2 cups hemp, almond or regular milk

1 avocado, halved

2 handfuls spinach

1 or 2 tablespoons honey (to taste)

6 to 8 mint leaves

Dash mint extract

Dash vanilla extract

Combine all ingredients in the blender. Makes one large serving or two small ones.

Happy Thanksgiving week, friends. I hope everyone is warm and cozy and gearing up to devour some delicious seasonal treats on the big day (and then for a few days thereafter).

Last week, I shared an easy and tasty side dish perfect for bringing to dinner or adding to your own menu. This week, I've decided I’d share a recipe geared more to those inevitable holiday hours when everyone is around the house, looking for something fun to do, and trying to avoid eating all of the special Turkey Day food (both before and after the day itself).

Therefore, I present the perfect, healthy, kid-friendly snack for this holiday week (and the ones we’ll have in December): Tea-Time Banana Sandwiches.

These are easy, require no special equipment, and, by design, they include ingredients you probably already have around the house: bananas, peanut butter and chocolate. Because, if there’s one thing that’s no fun, it’s heading to the store for a single ingredient during the holiday rush.

Make a few with your kids while you enjoy the holiday hours together, and then make them again over winter break in a few weeks. They’re messy and won’t impress guests, but they’re good fun for the kids and the grownups, and they double as a not-so-bad cabin fever snack.

They're not pretty, but they're kid's play for children and grownups alike and require no special equipment to make.
by Sarah Henning

In a double broiler (or a glass bowl mounted over water in a saucepan), begin to melt the chocolate chips over low heat. Meanwhile, slice the bananas into quarter-inch slices. Spread a bit of peanut butter on half the slices (this is awkward but fun) and then assemble your banana-peanut butter sandwiches.

When the chocolate has melted, use a toothpick (or just your fingers — no need to head to the store for just toothpicks!) to dip one side of the banana sandwiches in chocolate. Place each dipped sandwich on the lined cookie sheet.

When all the sandwiches are made and coated, place the cookie sheet in the freezer for at least 10 minutes. Then pull them out and enjoy.

You can store these in the freezer, but they probably won't last long enough to do so.

Variation: If you want a version without any refined sugar, swap the chocolate chips for 1/4 cup semi-soft coconut oil (too melted and it won’t coat properly), 1 tablespoon (or more) maple syrup and 1 teaspoon cocoa powder. Mix it together and use it to coat the sandwiches. You may need to freeze the sandwiches once first and then dip them in this mixture before returning them to the freezer.

Yes, this space is called "Eat Your Vegetables" and we all know I implore y'all to do that as much as humanly possible.

But let's be real a second: The holiday season is most assuredly not about the vegetables.

If we're talking food, it's about the cookies.

Sugar cookies. Pinwheels. Spritz.

So many beautiful, sweet beauties. So, so little time.

OK, that's not true. We have a full month's run up of cookies from Thanksgiving to Christmas Day. Cookies, cookies every day.

Cookie decorating was always a huge deal in my house. My mother makes about 10 different types of cookies. Maybe more. Honestly, I've kind of lost track now that I don't get to see her make them over the course of a couple of weeks in early December. Macaroons, pecan pie bars, mint chocolate fudge and the aforementioned sugar cookies, pinwheels and spritz. There are others, to be sure, changing a bit each year, but those are the classics.

Since we've come to celebrate Christmas in Lawrence, we've come up with a new twist on the necessary cookie baking. My mom brings a sampling of the cookies she makes at home (see that pretty tin above). And then she makes and decorates sugar cookies with my son here.

The result is a family tradition that's been kept intact for 30 years.

My son's day of working the cookie line looks pretty delicious.
by Sarah Henning

I remember being in preschool, watching my mom cut and bake stars, trees, wreaths and candy canes. Then, once they were cool and we had a good chunk of time, we'd crank Mannheim Steamroller, huddle over the table, bowls of homemade icing thickly holding their appointed spoons, sprinkles at the ready and decorate until every last cookie was primped and primed into cookie stardom.

Well, my mother's sugar cookies were the stars. Mine were not.

Try as I might, I never — even as a teen or an adult — had the skill, patience and steady hand to properly decorate cookie after cookie without them turning into an accident at the Crayola factory.

My mother, on the other hand, could (and can) create endless little green sprinkle wreaths (each with their own bows), perfect red stripes to white-frosted candy canes and many other designs.

Time will tell if my son is more of a natural cookie decorator than I am. He probably will be, judging by the cookies he churned out for this Christmas (look at those pretty cookies above!).

The most popular question I think nearly any vegan/vegetarian gets after the ubiquitous “But where do you get your protein???” question is this: “But don’t you miss _?” And, this time of year, that blank is more often than not filled with something related to holiday food.

“But don’t you miss turkey? Gravy? Pumpkin pie???”

Honestly? No.

I could say this is because there are vegan/vegetarian answers to pretty much anything that ends up on the table at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Which is totally true, but in my case I don’t miss any of those things because, I never really ate them in the first place.

Everyone is different, of course. That goes for you, too, omnivores! No one thinks to ask you, "But don't you miss _?" just because you don't eat something. Thus, not every omnivore eats every single thing on his or her Thanksgiving table. Example: Thanksgiving is my sister’s absolute favorite “food” holiday, but even she only eats turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy. No pie, no stuffing, no cranberry sauce. The woman likes what she likes, even if she could eat all of it.

The same thing goes for vegetarians. Just because we don’t choose to eat everything on the Thanksgiving table doesn’t mean we miss every single thing that won’t pass our lips.

Back when I ate animal products, my Thanksgiving meals were still vegetarian, if not vegan. I pretty much just at cranberry sauce, squash/sweet potatoes, rolls (yes, plural) and plain mashed potatoes. Yep. Pretty much from the time I have a memory on up until now. My favorite part of the holiday was always the family fun time and football, and never the food. In fact, I always wished there were some good restaurant open, so I could load up on anything BUT the normal holiday fare.

Of course, this isn’t true for every vegetarian or vegan out there. Some may sit through the whole dinner, pining away for a piece of dark meat beached in a pond of gravy or a slice (or three) of pie.

So, with all that in mind, I’m going to tell you exactly what I had for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s not the norm, but it was fabulous and I didn’t feel the need to hop in the car for a last-minute Tofurkey (which, to be honest, I’ve never had and probably will never want to have).

Honestly, this holiday ornament wreath was much easier to make than it appears.
by Mike Yoder

I have never been a crafty person. And by crafty, I mean in the Etsy sense, not the Tyrion Lannister sense.

Sure, I can sew, but it's never more than to fix a missing button. I don't paint, unless you count basic walls and trim. And whenever my son asks me to draw for him, the requested animal/shape/choo-choo train comes out looking like it has been forged by a Mack truck.

No, my "art" is most definitely in my writing (I hope). Though if you ever asked me to handwrite anything you'll wonder both how I escaped being drafted into medical school based on scrawl alone and how I finished school at all writing test papers by hand.

And yet, I do like the idea of being crafty. My mother is quite the crafter, though as a college professor, she barely has time to sit down at her pottery wheel (yes, she has one). When she does have time, she likes to paint, stamp, decoupage, sew and, yes, do pottery. She even had a loom in the ’80s. Cool, huh? She's also the first to admit that I have NONE of her skill despite my genes and my love of Pinterest.

So, she probably was surprised when I messaged her ahead of Thanksgiving, asking if she might be able to bring her glue gun with her while visiting for the holiday. I planned to make "the wreath" I told her.

"The wreath" is a project I'd had my eye on since last year. I'd seen on some site or another a picture of a holiday wreath made out of glass ball ornaments. It was unusual, cool, and if I wanted to buy one on Etsy, expensive as all get out. But with a simple search, I was able to find several different sets of directions on how to make my own out of shatter-proof ornaments. So, after the holidays last year, I bought some discount ornaments, with plans on making the wreath.

It never happened.

Problem No. 1: I couldn't decide on which method to use. You can make it with a foam wreath, string it on a bent hanger or cord of wire, or you could just buy an evergreen wreath and attach the ornaments to that. All the methods looked good, but they also yielded different types of wreaths. You could have a thin one made of wire (bent hanger or otherwise), you could have a slightly bigger one made with a foam wreath, or you could have a very "full" looking one by using the evergreen wreath method.

Problem No. 2: I was stuck with the hanger/cord method because I do not own a glue gun and I didn't want to buy one because, as I've said before, I'm not crafty at all. It would be a waste of money. I could've picked up a cheap one, I suppose, but I'm sure if that thing exploded and oozed hot glue all over me, I'd never attempt to craft again.

Problem No. 3: If I was going to attempt this wreath, I wanted it to look how it did in my brain. Which was full and big, gosh darn it. So, basically, I wanted to do something I couldn't do with a cord of wire or a hanger from the dry-cleaners.

So, I stowed the ornaments in the back of my guest closet and forgot about them ... until, I saw a cheap ornament wreath at Target in Novemeber. It was shiny and pretty, and exactly what I wanted, yet not at all. It was like one everyone could have. I didn't want that, I wanted the one I pictured in my head.

As I stood there, three feet from that pretty, easily obtainable wreath, I Googled the project I'd tossed aside last year. That search came up with this post, which featured the closest thing I could find to the wreath in my head.

Weeks later, when my mom arrived with her glue gun, we headed out to Michael's to look at more parts and pieces. We'd initially changed our minds and thought about using a foam wreath as the structure, but I still had that pretty wreath in my head, and decided in the end to go with an evergreen wreath as the base (bonus: the 18-inch evergreen was only $3.99, half of what a foam wreath would've cost). We bought some silver spray paint, too, and that night, I put on my husband's barbecue apron and stood in our garage, spray-painting the wreath on top of some flattened diaper boxes.

I let it air out for a day, and then, on Sunday morning, literally two hours before my parents had to leave for the airport, my mom and I warmed up the glue gun. At first, it was helpful to have two of us working on it — one to place glue on the ornaments and one to hold the glued ornament flush to the wreath — as we went around the outside edge with large ornaments. By the time we started around the inside (following the directions in this post), I was working alone, no help needed. My mom backed away to finish packing — the training wheels had officially come off.

In about an hour, I had a big, totally unique wreath exactly like I'd pictured in my head last year. It is fat, colorful and shiny and exactly what I wanted.

One project does not a crafter make, it's true. But this single project sure went a long way toward convincing me that I might have a crafty bone in my body after all. A bone that is absolutely terrified to actually hang my pretty ornament wreath for fear it might shatter like a pearl necklace. So, rather than hanging it in my dining room window as planned, I have it sitting sentry on my dining room table as a sort of holiday centerpiece.

And I kind of like it like that — just sitting there as a reminder of spending time with my mom, doing something she likes to do. Maybe next time I see her, we'll try another craft. Of course, I'm not going to start saving up for my own pottery wheel anytime soon, but at least I now own a (hand-me-down) glue gun.